Act of Will

by A. J. Hartley

  “So you were deliberately sailing close to the wind.”

  “If you have to sail at all, you may as well get a thrill out of it.”

  “But,” she said, coming back to the matter in hand with a jolt, “the raiders have attacked villages and convoys in Shale as well as elsewhere.”

  “True. But, as you said, they also seem to have staged an attack on Arlest in which their own people got killed. Maybe they wanted to divert suspicion, or thin out the population a bit. You know, make resources go further.”

  “That’s appalling.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It is.”

  As the sun got low behind us I turned over the question as to why Arlest had let us go. Though it was tempting, I couldn’t quite resign myself to the idea that—if it was him holding the reins of the raiders—he had believed us so completely that he no longer considered us a danger. That seemed far too casual for so meticulous an operation, even considering what a wooden sword our knowledge was. Someone in that room, maybe several or all of them, knew that our discovery of those barracks had always been a danger. That they took our departure so calmly bothered me and made me wonder for a moment exactly who it was who had been deceived. I felt the explanation in my bowels rather than in my head. They were about to do something that would make our suspicions and discoveries worthless: something conclusive.

  It was getting too dark to go on, rather like this narrative. We would soon have to camp or stay in an inn. I told Renthrette that I was worried. For once she didn’t seem to want solid reasons. I wondered if she felt it too, that sense of brooding heaviness, like the air before a storm. I was glad when we came upon an inn and the chance for a beer and a night’s sleep. Renthrette suggested that we get up early and—if we could buy or rent them from the innkeeper—yoke two extra horses to the wagon. That way we might be over the Greycoast border by noon the following day.

  Nothing of a remotely personal nature happened.

  SCENE LI

  A Decision

  By the evening of the second day we were only ten miles from the road between Ironwall and Hopetown and we had worked our four horses till they staggered and snorted with resentment. I patted one on the neck and it tried to bite my hand off. I sat, gazing out of the back of the wagon, and wondered vaguely what I was supposed to do if the raiders appeared. Wave? Make one last move on Renthrette? It would have to be a quick one.

  The track rolled through the Proxintar Downs until the Iruni Wood was small behind us. Atop each rise we looked for horsemen, and on one of the highest of the hills we could see the distant citadel of Ironwall to the southeast as the sun set. Even from this distance, it was impressive. We would make for it at first light and hope to find some of our company there, alive and well, though who knows what trouble they could have gotten themselves into by now.

  I made a small fire by the wagon while a little light remained and put a billy of vegetables and water on it. Renthrette tended the horses, whispering secretly to them. We ate, and the meal was hot, but nothing more. It wouldn’t feed my soul, but it might sustain my body until the raiders had other plans for it.

  For once she did not shrink away when I sat close to her, but her mind was elsewhere and I didn’t pursue the advantage. After a while, when her total lack of interest had started to infect me, I went to sleep under the wagon. I think she was grateful.

  It was just becoming light when I heard my name called by a strong male voice. I jumped, bashed my head on the front axle, and rolled out, instinctively moving away from the caller. With the wagon between me and him I had time to cock my crossbow before I peered round the side. My first thought was that the raiders had come, and my second was that Renthrette was nowhere in sight. The Downs boasted little in the way of cover, and though she could have been hiding somewhere nearby, I doubted it. I heard voices out there and swallowed hard. Not for the first time, I thought my number was up. And I wouldn’t get to use all those great speeches I’d memorized. It was the actor’s nightmare, dying alone, poised to give the best performance of his career to an empty house.

  “I’ll show them what Will Hawthorne is made of,” I muttered to myself, almost immediately regretting my choice of words. I dived out from behind the wagon, grunting as I hit the ground and shooting the crossbow towards the approaching people. The bolt whistled wildly off into the air and they ducked as it soared harmlessly overhead.

  “It’s a good thing you still can’t shoot,” called a large black man. “If that had come near me, I’d have been really irritated.”

  “Orgos!” I shouted. “Lisha! Where have you been?”

  I ran towards them shouting random insults at the top of my lungs. And then I saw that they weren’t alone. With them, brandishing makeshift weapons that looked suspiciously like farming implements, were Maia, her parents, and the other villagers. Lisha had gathered more from the surrounding area, so that there were forty or fifty of them, probably all homeless and destitute, all looking for a cause around which to rally.

  They were pleased to see me, and I got the distinct impression that even those villagers I had never met had heard things—good things—about me from the others. It was like being back on the stage in Cresdon.

  “Hello, Will,” said Maia. She smiled a little but her eyes were as big and serious as ever. Recent events seemed to have aged her, and when she gravely put out her tiny hand to shake mine, it didn’t seem inappropriate. I said hello and chatted to the ones I recognized, though it was an odd dynamic, since we had been through fire and death together but knew nothing of each other. Most of them were no more than faces from a dream and I couldn’t think of anything to say to them. But they smiled and shook my hand or slapped me on the shoulder as if genuinely glad to see me; as if, in fact, they thought my presence would somehow help. They were all armed, even the children, and suddenly my heart sank, because this could mean nothing but torment and death.

  “Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” I said.

  “The raiders are out in force and moving this way,” said Orgos. “A lot has happened since last we spoke. Renthrette has told us of what you have discovered and we have the highest regard for you—”

  “Save it,” I said, pretending not to care.

  Orgos nodded and grinned before continuing his story. “When the raiders appeared in force on the Verneytha border a week ago, Mithos went to see the governor. Treylen authorized Mithos to take control of what troops were available, some two hundred light cavalry. We got word to Hopetown, where Garnet met with Duke Raymon. As the raiders moved out onto the moors of northern Greycoast, Mithos took command of the Verneytha cavalry and began to press them south. No blows have yet been struck, but we hope to join our small force with the armies of Hopetown and Ironwall to effect a pincer movement, trapping the raiders on the plains before the citadel. It will be a bloody encounter, but one which will end the threat of the raiders. We’ll need you to help organize our forces.”

  I looked at them standing there, so brave and noble, and wondered if they’d forgotten the way the raiders had mauled us when we had crawled up from the coast with our cargo of coal. For a second I could smell the battle, see it, hear it, feel the sweat on my back and the blood in my eyes. I saw the raiders as I had first seen them in the flame and smoke of a sacked village, their lances lowered and bronze faces impassive. I pictured that crimson machine materializing out of the fog, biting through the untutored ranks of our boy soldiers and farmers, and my heart bled for them.

  But most of all, it bled for me.

  “I’m sorry, Orgos,” I said. “This is as far as I go.”

  SCENE LII

  A Different Road

  Well, do you blame me? Really? It was—had always been—hopeless. But calling Mithos’s name wouldn’t help now, and we weren’t facing a handful of them, stuck in the tight spiral of a lighthouse. We were facing an army, hundreds of them, appearing out of the mist on top of us. I knew what they were capable of (in every sense of that phrase) a
nd no talk of principle could make a silk purse out of this particular sow’s ear. It would be a rout, and I would have no part in it.

  I’m not sure when I made the decision to leave, though the possibility had been there since I first met them and had never completely gone away, even when things seemed to have been going well. But lately things hadn’t been going well and I had nearly wound up dead too many times. The idea that all those encounters had been mere rehearsals for the grand show itself was just too horrible. I couldn’t survive anything worse than I had already been through, and neither could they. Riding into certain death might be what they lived for. Not me.

  Orgos was furious, of course, and my attempts to persuade him to come with me, to persuade all of them to quit now while they still could, just made him madder. Renthrette stared at me, her face flushed as if I’d slapped her very hard. As Lisha was saying that she understood my position and that I had more than repaid them for getting me out of Cresdon, she walked away and started messing around with her horse’s bridle, without looking back.

  “You’ll need some expenses to get out of Shale,” said Lisha, handing me a small purse.

  “I don’t need your money,” I said, suddenly feeling defensive.

  “You earned it,” she said. “Though I wish you would reconsider.”

  “You too,” I said. “And I’m no use to you anyway.”

  She started to say something, but I waved it away. “You know what the odds are in this battle you’re walking into?” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered. “But I know that without us, these people, Maia and the others you saved, have no chance at all. We have to try. Even if we can’t win, it is important to stand up to an enemy like this. I know you don’t think that ideas like that serve a purpose, but sometimes even destruction is better than compromise.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t believe that. There are battles elsewhere you could win, causes you could champion. Why throw yourselves away in something so obviously futile?”

  “Because this is where we are now,” she said firmly. “This is the injustice we are confronted with, and no fight is wholly futile.”

  There was nothing to say to this. Orgos had been fuming up and down the makeshift campsite, but his anger had burned out. When I finally sidled up to him he just listened gravely and then smiled a sad, distant smile. “I had hoped you would ride into battle beside me,” he said.

  “You’ll do better without me,” I said honestly. “It’s pointless to say otherwise, and it’s pointless to ask you to be careful and not take risks unnecessarily, but . . . Look after yourselves. Please.”

  Lisha shook my hand and wished me well. Orgos clamped me to his chest and then, before releasing me, stared hard into my face.

  “You’re a good man, Orgos,” I said, really believing it for the first time.

  “So are you, Will,” he said. It was a kind of entreaty. I smiled and shook my head sadly, and walked away. I wasn’t a good man. I never had been. But I was a survivor, and that had to be worth something, to me if not to anybody else.

  As I climbed into the saddle of my mare, I turned to look back at Renthrette. But I couldn’t place her among the crowd, and after a moment feeling foolish and indecisive as the villagers watched me, I rode away.

  I figured I’d head west, mainly because it would be the shortest way out of the region, but also because it would take me back towards Stavis, which was at least familiar. I doubted I’d dare risk returning to Cresdon, even if I could find passage across the Hrof, but Stavis would serve as a place where I could gather my thoughts and look for options. Surely the Empire would have forgotten Will Hawthorne by now?

  The downside of heading west was crossing Shale. Since I really didn’t want to ever lay eyes on the Adsine keep again, I figured I’d head north for a little ways, skirt the city, and then dip south and west again, wending my slow way across the two hundred miles of Targev coastline we had glimpsed from the deck of the Cormorant. Two hundred miles was a long way, but since I had no real destination in mind, it didn’t matter so much. Maybe I’d find a town with a little theatre or a pub where I could pull pints for a while.

  I had the whole day ahead of me and, with luck, I’d be out of Shale territory before I had to stop for the night. The light rain that had been hanging around the area like a pathetic friend you couldn’t get rid of finally pushed off, and even the scraggy hills and tussocky fields looked almost beautiful enough to put the past weeks out of my mind. By midmorning I had started cutting north. I trotted on, right through lunch, until Adsine was behind me and I was only a few hours from the edge of Shale. I ate in the saddle wondering how mobile I’d be the following day after all this riding. It was still light, and I could see the sea. After another hour or so I passed through a tiny hamlet and dismounted to ask how far it was to the border.

  “The Shale border?” replied an old woman with a basket of pears on her back. “You passed it about a mile back. You’re in Targev now.”

  I nearly kissed her, but reason won out (she was seventy-five if she was a day) and I opted to celebrate my departure from the life of an adventurer by booking a room in the local inn and washing down the best supper on offer with a few pints of strong brown ale. I was still too close to Shale to expect a real feast, but I booked into the imaginatively titled Red Lion with a light heart and a sense of real escape, and not just from the raiders. It was the entire world I had gotten away from, that universe where wrongs have to be righted at tremendous personal risk and no one ever gets a decent meal or curls up with a warm body beside them. I ordered two pints, then, as soon as I got my platter of potatoes and roast pork—studded with rosemary and lined with a perfect ribbon of soft fat and crunchy skin—asked for a third.

  There was no one else staying at the Red Lion. The landlord said that traffic on the road to Shale had completely dried up since the raiders had become a feature in the region. He wanted me to swap theories and speculations about who they were and what they were after, but I wouldn’t be drawn.

  “Just passing through,” I said. “Can’t say I’ve heard much about them.”

  He would have told me all he knew (most of it rubbish) but the journey and my first decent meal in weeks had exhausted me, and I could honestly tell him that I was ready for bed. It was one of those rare nights when, proverbially, I really was out as soon as my head hit the pillow, and my sleep was deep and dreamless.

  I was woken by the sound of movement and voices downstairs. I wandered unsteadily down, still bleary-eyed, conscious that the sun was barely up. The landlord was talking to a tall man in a long grey traveling cloak dripping with the rain that had apparently returned. It was his boots that were making all the noise on the wooden floor. The landlord spotted me and made an apologetic face.

  “Let me just deal with this gentleman, and then I’ll start breakfast,” he said.

  I settled at a table and gave myself over to waking up properly as they haggled over the price of meat and bread. I peered out of one of the leaded windows into the courtyard, where four or five men were tethering horses and stretching as if they’d been on the road a while already. They all wore the same rain-spotted grey cloaks. The exact same cloak. I sat up, needled with a familiar anxiety, and at that moment, one of them came into the bar, stamping and shrugging off his wet clothes.

  My first thought was that they were raiders and the grey cloaks were their version of being incognito. But the cloaks were clearly a uniform, one that fit neither the raiders nor any of the troops we had seen before. Shale soldiers wore black, Greycoast blue and silver, Verneytha green and copper. So who were these guys, and where had they come from? Maybe they were some neutral party from the north who could be persuaded to go and bail Orgos and co. out of the death trap they had thrown themselves into. . . .

  As these hopeful thoughts circulated vaguely in my head, three things struck me almost simultaneously, appearing raiderlike out of the mist and driving all optimism into a screaming retreat. F
irst, the prices being quoted by the landlord were astronomical if there were only five or six of them looking for a few loaves and a joint of pork. Second, the strangers all had the sort of fluid, powerful bearing that comes from training, exercise, and discipline. And last (but worst of all) was the fact—revealed unmistakably as the newcomer turned from hanging up his dripping cloak—that they wore shortswords and steel grey armor over white linen tunics emblazoned with a blue diamond.

  I moved as quickly as I could to the door and looked out beyond the courtyard to where a hundred Empire troops, bristling with spears, their horses steaming, were sheltering from the rain, hoping to grab some fresh provisions for their journey east. They had found me after all.

  But of course, they hadn’t come for me. You didn’t send a hundred battle-hardened Empire troops (and who knew how many more right behind them) all the way from Stavis after a minor fugitive. So what were they doing?

  It seemed obvious. They had heard of the escalating problems in Shale, Verneytha, and Greycoast, and were moving east to capitalize on the slaughter. They would wait for the crippled victors to emerge, broken and bleeding, and they would roll right over them before they could take a breath, conquering all three lands in a handful of minor skirmishes. And if Orgos, Renthrette, and the rest survived the raiders, they would be wiped out in the conquest that followed.

  It was as if one of the soldiers—it no longer seemed to matter much whether they wore red or white—had pushed the tip of his spear into my bowels and leaned on it, so the cold hard truth passed through my body, bringing pain and horror and delirium. You hear of people having their lives pass before their eyes in moments of danger. I had thought the experience would be kind of interesting, if not, in my case, terribly impressive. But now—a moment as full of dread and danger as any I had experienced in the dreadful and dangerous weeks that had just passed—I saw not my life, but other people’s deaths. Suddenly I saw—as in a dream, but with absolute clarity—Orgos’s body cut down and bleeding in the thick of the fight. I saw Garnet unhorsed and lifeless. I heard Lisha scream for the first and last time. I saw Mithos outnumbered and weakening as he flailed and parried. I saw Renthrette facedown in the mud of battle, her hair stained with blood and filth as the victorious Empire tramped past.